Archive for July, 2016

My short handbook on learning a second language for the purposes of magical research and practice is now available on Amazon for the Kindle.

Fiction and art gives us the image of a magician bent over his or her books, puzzling out strange languages and incanting in dead tongues. There’s some truth to that fictional image: real occult practitioners do study languages, read spells in Latin, puzzle out arcane hieroglyphs. This booklet is an enthusiastic encouragement to those occult practitioners who want to delve into the study of languages for their own magical work. Whether it’s to have those Latin incantations roll off the tongue, or to read grimoires in German and French that have never been translated into English, or to swap techniques at the local magical bodega, the study of language can enrich a magician’s life, just as it enriches anyone’s life. This book will serve as a helpful guide even to those new to the study of language, or intimidated by it, or convinced that they’re just not good at learning languages.
This handbook offers specific help in learning some of the trickier parts of many popular magical languages, both living and dead. It also offers general advice for how to delve into the study of language, whether that be to achieve fluency, or just to be able to read a spell or two, or string together an impressive and grammatically correct phrase in Hebrew, Latin, or some other ancient language of power.